Tucker: If we erase the past, prepare for the consequences

August 15, 2017 Tucker Carlson’s Thoughts. Slavery is undoubtedly evil. But remember George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and 41 of the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Should we no longer preserve our institutions and just dismiss them as evil?

Flurry of emails between Justice, FBI and White House came just days before Comey cleared Hillary Clinton in email scandal

One of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s top lawyers at the Justice Departmenthelped editObama administration press statements about the infamous meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton on a tarmac last summer.

The same attorney, Paige Herwig, is now the deputy general counsel for Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That panel is nowinvestigatingwhether Lynch played any role in trying to influence the scope or intensity of the FBI’s investigation into the Hillary Clinton email scandal.

Prior to her legal work with Lynch at Justice, Herwig was a special assistant and associate counsel to President Obama.

Newly released Justice Department emails show that Herwig, whose title was counselor to the attorney general at the time, helped edit the first media statement responding to inquiries about the tarmac meeting. Those emails were included in 413 pages of Justice Department documents the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The emails show that on June 29, 2016, two days after the Clinton-Lynch meeting when the national news media was first learning of the tarmac one-on-one, Melanie Newman, the then-director of public affairs at the Justice Department, emailed her FBI counterpart to “flag” the media stories about the tarmac meeting that she noted were “gaining traction tonight.”

Newman included a transcript of a question Lynch answered about the meeting the following day, as well as Justice Department talking points on the topic, which are redacted in the emails.

The 2016 Election and the Demise of Journalistic Standards

Michael Goodwinis the chief political columnist forThe New York Post. He has a B.A. in English literature from Columbia College and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining the Post in 2009, he was the political columnist forThe New York Daily News, where he served as executive editor and editorial page editor and led its editorial board to a Pulitzer Prize. Prior to that, he worked for 16 years atThe New York Times, beginning as a clerk and rising to City Hall Bureau Chief. He is the co-author ofI, Kochand editor ofNew York Comes Back.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 20, 2017, in Atlanta, Georgia, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar.

I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.

It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up atThe New York Times, so I’m familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government—and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford inAll the President’s Men. Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That’s because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.

From Martha Stewart to Frank Quattrone to Steven Hatfill, former FBI director James Comey has left a long trail of highly questionable obstruction of justice cases that he used to make a name for himself.

Following countdown clocks on cable outlets and dramatic claims in the media about what devastating testimony to expect, James Comey sat down before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. The hearing ended up being abit of a let-downfor critics of President Trump who hoped to get him impeached (or removed via the 25th amendment!) as soon as possible. Comey admitted that Donald Trump had told the truth when he wrote that the former FBI director had thrice told him he was not under investigation in the Russia meddling probe. Comey admitted that Trump had twice encouraged him to get to the bottom of the Russian meddling issue.

But the media chose to run with a dramatically different narrative. That narrative was if James Comey had not proven obstruction, he came pretty darn close.

“Comey Bluntly Raises Possibility of Trump Obstruction and Condemns His ‘Lies’,”exultedtheNew York Times, describing his testimony as “a blunt, plain-spoken assessment” by a man who was “humble, folksy and matter-of-fact.”

TheNew Yorkerwas even more breathless. “Comey’s Revenge: Measuring Obstruction,”wroteEvan Osnos. “[T]his was not a political partisan tossing off a criticism of a rival; this was a career prosecutor, who served Republican and Democratic Presidents, presenting a time line of specific statements from the President that he described as either untrue or potentially criminal.”

MSNBC agreed. And I watched an hour of CNN the night of the hearing with the sober legal analysis of Jeffrey Toobin, who declared repeatedly that he’d never seen such obstruction of justice in the history of the world. I’m only slightly exaggerating.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:The great irony here is that this has left Democrats increasingly choosing undemocratic means to get what they want. From President Obama’s boast that he would use his pen and phone to bypass Congress to the progressive use of the Supreme Court as its preferred legislature to the Iran and climate deals that made end runs around the Constitution, it all underscores one thing: The modern American progressive has no faith in the democratic process because he has no trust in the American people.

Nine years after Barack Obama accused small-towners of clinging to guns or religion, nearly three years after Jonathan Gruber was shown to have attributed ObamaCare’s passage to the stupidity of the American voter, and eight months after Hillary Clinton pronounced half of Donald Trump’s voters “irredeemable,” Democrats are now getting some sophisticated advice: You don’t win votes by showing contempt for voters.

In the last week or so a flurry of articles have appeared arguing for toning down the looking-down. In the New Republic Michael Tomaskywritesunder the heading “Elitism Is Liberalism’s Biggest Problem.” Over at theNew York Times,Joan C. Williamsweighs inwith “The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension.” Slategoes witha Q&A on “advice on how to talk to the white working class without insulting them.” Stanley Greenberg at the American Prospectwriteson “The Democrats’ ‘Working-Class Problem,’ ” and Kevin Drum at Mother Jonesasksfor “Less Liberal Contempt, Please.”